Those hoping filmmaker James Cameron will leave behind Pandora and get back to making other films – you may get your wish.
The legendary “Titanic,” “Aliens” and “The Terminator” director says if this December’s “Avatar: Fire and Ash” doesn’t make enough coin to justify moving forward with the proposed fourth and fifth films, he’s ready to move on.
Speaking with Matt Belloni’s The Town podcast, Cameron says:
“I have no doubt in my mind that this movie will make money. The question is, does it make enough money to justify doing it again?”
Asked if he’s ready and willing to walk away from it all, he says:
“Absolutely… I’ve been in ‘Avatar’ land for 20 years, actually 30 years, because I wrote it in 1995, but I wasn’t working continuously on it for those first ten years. There was a brief flurry of interest in ’95, and then everybody said, ‘You’re out of your mind,’ and I shelved it for ten years. And then we got serious in 2005.”
Reiterating one more time if this is the end, he’d be fine with it, Cameron says: “Yeah, absolutely. Sure. If this is where it ends, cool.”
Previously, Cameron indicated that the second and third films are linked and part of the same story, whereas the fourth and fifth films are new chapters set years in the future (a handful of scenes in the fourth were already shot).
Does the third leave any lingering threads? Cameron says:
“There is one open thread, and if it ends there theatrically, ‘I’ll write a book’. I’ll answer everybody’s question[s].”
Asked if he would pass on the franchise to another filmmaker, he says:
“Absolutely not…Look, I have choices there. There are levels in which I [can] immerse. I don’t think there’d ever be a version where there’s another ‘Avatar’ movie that I didn’t produce closely. But, in terms of it taking over my life, that’s a threshold issue for me.”
Cameron has multiple projects waiting for him should “Avatar: Fire and Ash” be the end, one of them being “Ghosts of Hiroshima” but that project may not be as set as people think. He says:
“That one [‘Ghosts’] just hit the headlines briefly because of the book announcement and trying to push the book to bestseller because the author is a friend of mine. It doesn’t mean I’m not going to make the film, but I haven’t written the script, and it’s not slated, and I don’t even have a distribution partner on it. It’s a pretty vaporware project right now.”
“Avatar: Fire & Ash” opens in cinemas nationwide on December 19th 2025.
